At the end of ten days squandered in El Cûds, Hassan Agha was further from obtaining his rifles than he had been at first passing the gate. The soldiers avoided him; it seemed they had their orders. Abd-ur-Rahman, though smiling when they met in the street, steadfastly refused him audience. On the fourteenth day he faced the stern necessity, if they were to stay much longer in that money-eating place, of selling one of the lovely steeds which were their glory.
In a certain tavern he cast lots with his men, whose horse should go; and the lot fell upon Nesìb the Thief, who straightway lifted up his voice and wept. Yet even he preferred the sacrifice to a shameful retreat, as though worsted by the boy Abd-ur-Rahman, while their beloved saint and his daughter, sole pretext of their coming, still abode in the city. They had taken it for granted beforehand that the cure of Alia by the wizard would be instantaneous, a mere wave of the hand, and resented its slowness as a deceit of the heathen dog.
Yet they were restrained from ventilating this grievance, and so easing their minds, by a captious whim of Hassan’s to uphold the Frankish pig.
“He is an English physician. If Allah permits, he will perform his part,” was the answer to their grumblings.
“What change is this, O lord Hassan!” cried one, thus repressed. “Is an Englishman other than a Frank, a vile infidel? Did they not deliver our land to the Muscovite, even while they touched our hands in friendship? How often hast thou denounced the whole brood of them?”
“Be silent!” Hassan commanded. “Taken separately they are good people—none better—brave and the slingstone of their word, but put together in the nation, they are treacherous as loose stones. Individuals of that race strove bravely with us against the Muscovite, while their nation betrayed them and us. It was commonly known in those days that this kind have neither honor nor nobility except when cut off. A strange people. Now this hakìm is cut off; he stands alone. Let be then, he will perform his covenant.”
“In sh’ Allah!” the band murmured, but this stopper on expression of their just annoyance only caused it to ferment.
In the temper to quarrel with their own shadows and kill whoever brushed against them, it was only by the courtesy or the cowardice of other wayfarers that they escaped embroilment. Even as it was, on two occasions their conduct called for the interference of the street watch.
In the wide open space before the tower, where fellahìn from Beyt-Laham and the surrounding villages stand to sell the produce of their fields, they one morning encountered Ismaìl, the doorkeeper of the Frank physician, going marketing, a basket on his arm.
Instantly Nesìb the Thief went mad, or so it seemed to his companions. Like a fierce dog, he flew snarling at the throat of the old negro.